Okay
by infamouslastwords
Summary: Prequel to "This." Cameron/Ferris. Look at him now, Cameron Frye, running across lawns in the dark to reach the only place he knows holds a good idea inside.


**Okay**

**by** infamous_last_**words**

A/N: This is a prequel to my fic titled "This."

See, Cameron had been setting back money with every birthday-check-Christmas-card-lawn-mowing-chore-allowance since he was eight and had figured out how the stock market worked. Of course he had never invested (too much risk, too much worrying), but there existed in his room a secret stash of these bills buried away for some far-off 'just in case.' He had also learned about how in the Fifties people had built bomb shelters for some inauspicious occasion, and that knowledge hit too close to home. For Cameron, this self-sustained bank was his bomb shelter in case his life exploded.

A couple times he had almost used all the money in one fell swoop; never on anything impractical, like the things Ferris would have amused himself with (Ferris knew about the stash but never mentioned it, even when joking), but on things that would have changed the course of his history, other people's histories, forever. Sometimes when he's alone at night and thinking, wired down and dreamy with all the medication he thought he'd needed, he entertains where he might've been now, had he used the money then, on that circumstance or this one. It makes him feel better and feel worse, alternately. He thinks of how people he's never met would have remembered him, or how they would've forgotten him.

But this time sets itself apart from those before-times. He digs out the container just like before, the fat roll of bills he would bit by bit trade in for bigger (five tens for a fifty, two fifties for a hundred) fitting neatly in his closed fist and then some; he would stare at it in a cold rage and start to get up, start to make collect calls to the operator on where to find this and that thing he would need. But eventually, always, he would put down the phone. He would wrap the bills back up and bury them, he would step up to his bed and lay down, calm down. He had never run away, he had never left his room with them—then, eventually, his father would regard him at some dinner or before school some morning, and everything would be forgotten. The things he did to push Cameron toward the things _he _did.

Maybe it is just the last straw on the camel's back. Maybe it's all those other straws that came before it and no matter how much cough syrup he slurped the fact they would never disappear from the back of his mind, be forgotten. Or maybe it's just that first time and since then he'd always known it'd end like this—that first time he walked into his dad's office seeking salvation and found only an empty chair. He had stolen something, felt compelled to pocket a pen tip or two, just to be spiteful. He had been given an adult sentence for his childish crime.

If only he knew how the spite would grow. Look at him now, Cameron Frye, running across lawns in the dark to reach the only place he knows holds a good idea inside. The bills a stress ball in his left hand, arms pumping as he crosses silent landscapes. His mind like this, precise and step-by-step, is so different than the jumble he's used to. The moonlight cuts through leaf-laden trees and his thoughts are honed, confident. All he has to do is reach this step in the plan, and then the next could be worked toward. It all seems so immediate and possible. Despite his alertness his heart is still.

Cameron comes to a halt in a small garden area and begins looking around in a plant bed for a piece of mulch, a bit of gravel. Picking up a handful of some rough shapes he steps back, aims, and throws with his right hand the stuff at a taller window on the corner of the house. It takes three more tries before the light comes on, a minute before the shades slide open, seconds for the latch of the lock to click and the window pane creak.

Ferris' silhouette against his room lamp moves toward the window—Cameron can see him cupping his hands around his face, sleep-eyes still trying to see in the dark. He steps forward across the back lawn, coming into view, holding his arm up, slowly waving it in its entirety. Ferris finally sees and signals. Cameron walks around the house to the front door and is met by the stealthy teen, who is in house slippers.

"Be quiet," Ferris mouths, motioning again as he shuts the door behind Cameron, leading the way up the stairs to his room. Once inside, Ferris sitting back down on his bed, Cameron stands by and suddenly has no idea what he's doing. The sight of his friend's face in the light is familiar enough to shock him back to himself, to his reality.

"I did it," he breathes, and Ferris looks up at him curiously. "He was just there screaming… and I did it."

Ferris holds up his hands. "Did what, Cameron?"

He opens his mouth but no words manage to form. Ferris pats the space next to him and whispers, "Sit down, stay quiet. Come on. Tell me."

Cameron trudges over, feeling the power he'd had just minutes before drain to his toes and out onto the floor. He sits, and Ferris slides up next to him, sleepily putting an arm on his shoulder. It takes a second to get the courage up to say it, the aftertaste of the words on his tongue now striking him bitter instead of sweet. It takes a second to feel terror that words can't be unsaid, that maybe he wouldn't want to unsay them if given the chance.

Deep breath in, shaky, "I told him I was leaving."

Ferris's forehead goes furrowed in the center. "Leaving?"

The split-second it takes for him to recognize the forgetful misunderstanding on Ferris' face is enough to make him re-experience every wrong ever done to him by the same boy. Suddenly he feels angry all over again; he shoves Ferris from him and says, voice raising, "The car, Ferris. The car. He saw the car and almost skinned me and I hit him back and said I was leaving for good."

Whatever had been unawake in Ferris' brain wakes at the sound of this—Cameron sees it happen through his friend's eyes.

"Oh," comes first. Then, "Shit.

"But you can fix it, right, you can tell him someone broke in or that I—" backtracking, getting up to follow Cameron across the room as he paces in a muted fury. Cameron rounds on him.

"No, Ferris, I told him everything, I looked straight at him and told him the truth and you know what? He doesn't deserve that car because of his priorities. He doesn't deserve the life he's built around himself, he doesn't deserve any of it. Excuses, forgiveness, my mother, fuck—I mean," and then he just starts to get incoherent, hands moving and eyes watering and voice louder until Ferris moves a hand over his mouth and puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back down to the bed and he can't breathe for almost thirty seconds straight. Lying there, looking up at the ceiling among the sheets that smell of his friend, he thinks again of lives he hasn't lived, and the lives he's deprived other people by being there, by not being there. For a second he wonders what it's like to be Ferris, to have Sloane and all of these great ideas and super self-assurance. To have parents that say 'I love you' every night before you go to sleep. How he is so used to it he throws it away and lies to their faces for a day of fun.

"Cameron… Cam."

He opens his eyes and realizes a few minutes have gone by. Did he pass out? Ferris is leaning over him, concerned.

"Please, spend the night here if you need a place, it's the least I can do, really."

Cameron looks long into his friend's face, so full of earnest, attempted comfort. Then, with his right hand he reaches up to place a finger on Ferris' bottom lip, just to touch it, maybe feel it while it still has residual movement in it. The firm kiss he substitutes for the digit is an afterthought, a half-thank you, and once he pulls away and removes his hand from the front of Ferris' robes, he starts and lay back against the mattress, saying, "Okay."

Ferris holds the gaze for a moment before letting his eyes trail down the mattress, to Cameron's left hand. Inside, the roll of bills still fight against the stress pressure of Cameron's clenched fist. Ferris pulls the fingers back over the bills like opening a clam, carefully, and takes them. He moves to his nightstand, and, watching Cameron as if making sure he understood, places the roll in the top drawer. Folding the duvet over Cameron, he perches himself on the side of his own bed and finds Cameron staring up at him.

"Get some sleep, huh? I think today was a little too exciting," that familiar, subtle laughter—only to make things lighter, happier, with no intentions of making fun. Cameron realizes that sometimes he forgot this about Ferris; forgot that people can have good intentions when they say the things they do, act the way they do. He has to remind himself, he thinks, pulling Ferris down by the collar of his robe and kissing him again, that he has a good friend here.

"Cam," Ferris begins as they break part, a hair away from his face, eyes still closed. "Why now?"

Cameron licks his top lip and unintentionally touches Ferris' own, beginning to speak over the sound of his friend's inward groan; "I just realized a lot of things, today, I guess. Things I already knew." He pauses. "I don't feel like I'm doing this, Ferris. I know I am, and it makes sense to me to do it. I'm not afraid of it like I used to be."

"Well I am," his friend breathes.

"Well, stop," Cameron says, the corner of his mouth turning up in a half-smirk. He maneuvers Ferris to the bed, mouth positioned in tandem with the controlled arc of movement—he tries to connect the kiss, only to have Ferris make a second's hesitation. Brown eyes meet his, suddenly sparking.

"I figured out some stuff today too, okay." He swallows. "Like, I'm gonna marry Sloane."

Slowly, Cameron finds ground and sits back on the mattress. He stares at Ferris the whole time, incomprehensible. Part of him understands, knows this is the natural order to things—love, marriage, baby in a baby carriage—but childhood rhymes recede to replace what is here, now, sitting mostly in his lap. When he was thirteen and mowing lawns he thought about the money, the then five-years money hidden which the day's earnings would make thicker. Somehow, some part of him always included Ferris in these grand plans; how would Ferris react if suddenly Cameron was starting his own company in Seattle, or even just the look on his face when he'd get him exactly what he wanted for his birthday: To Ferris, From Cameron. He had never needed to adjust these plans much for the girls before; Rebecca, Lindsay, Sarah each going on in their unaffected ways, mostly just there for a good ex-girlfriend story, if you could even call a girl Ferris 'went out' with an ex. But marriage. Marriage is anything but unaffected.

"Oh, are you?" Cameron counters. "Are you going to have rice thrown on you and get into the car with the cans trailing behind it?" He throws a little shoulder into it. "Drive right up to your big suburban house where the rugrats grow out of the furniture no one sits on in the fancy front room? Are you going to live in a house like this one, Ferris? With a staircase like this one? Are you going to shack up with the first person you fall in love with and be a part of this never ending cycle of your parents, your parent's parents, and on and on forever?"

Ferris crumples slightly. "Cam, I thought—" then the lower lip puffs out, indignant. "You know what Cameron Frye, Sloan is not the first person I've been in love with. And if you think that my dream being the same as every other American's dream is so stupid, then fuck you alright. I'm a coward for wanting safety, an—and security, and a nuclear family?"

"It's a pipe dream, Ferris. Even people who have that stuff don't really have that stuff."

Ferris hardens his pout into a scowl. "I love her. Why are you trying to ruin that."

Rolling his eyes, "If you really love her, then I won't be able to ruin that. Your ideas about adult life will ruin that, once you actually get into it and look around and realize it isn't at all what you thought it was going to be."

Ferris looks at his mouth the whole time, brows knit close together. "How will it be, then?" eyes flicking up to Cameron's.

He sighs, weary. "I don't know. Marriage shuts a lot of doors."

"But how would you know, you've never been with anyone." The tone is no longer hurt, combatative—it's turned curious, edged with urgency.

"That doesn't matter. You've never been married before, have you?"

"No, but I'm in love. Love lets you know about these things."

Cameron tilts his chin down, wrapping his fingers around his ankle. Feeling the fabric of his sock. "I know."

"We can't both be right."

"I know."

"Cam… kiss me again."

"Okay."

Cameron uses his legs to maneuver, stretching them out on either side of Ferris' sitting form. Ferris' thighs underneath his thighs, he takes the waiting face into his hands and bends one of the ears forward because he is so firm in his handling—foreheads together, the bones of the cheeks and the jaws resilient under his digits.

They're kissing halfway into Ferris's, "Cam, Cam do it, please, I need—" with closed, hard mouths that open up into something soft, something with tongue that makes every part of Ferris go quiet—Cameron hears his bodily silence, his complete sinking-into of the moment. His eyes are half-lidded and unseeing when Cameron pulls back for a bigger breath. He presses his lips again to the corner of Ferris' mouth, hand lingering on the nape of his neck before sliding around and dropping to the bed sheets.

Ferris, sitting there, dazed, when Cameron stops.

"Today has been too exciting," he says. "I'm buying a plane ticket in the morning. To Denver. Some cousins of mine—"

The look on Ferris' face could stop time. "What the fuck even is Denver? Why the fuck Denver all the sudden?" He pauses and the embers burn in his eyes. "Look—about today, and your dad, and the car—I'm sorry. I'm sorry you won't stay the summer, and I'm sorry I said something that made you stop touching me. I really fucking want you to touch me, Cam."

"I can't just keep saying 'okay,' Ferris."

"Yes you can. Why can't you?"

"Because of Denver. Because of you—of Sloane." Cameron sighs. "Because!" he finishes, exasperated.

Ferris's eyes are wide and wild. "It's not fair. It's not fair you get to escape and that I have to watch on at you running. You've never once run toward me the same way you run away from me. Never. Why is that?"

"Because," Cameron repeats, quieter.

"I loved you first." And it is all childish, all bravely honest: Ferris, exactly. "You were the first person I ever loved, Cam, and now you're literally ripping my heart out."

It is exactly what Cameron's waited to hear for so long, but somehow the words sound different than how he imagined them.

"Who—who comes into someone's room and just… kisses them? And says they're leaving? Just like that? Our whole lives, Cam. It was you and me, wasn't it?"

"And now it'll be you and Sloane, apparently." He knows the words are harsh, he knows he wants to hurt Ferris with them. "I'm just getting out of the way."

Ferris frowns. He reaches out to Cameron's arm, his shirt—he bunches the fabric in his fist. "Don't go." Ferris looks so small and scared. "Stay here. Kiss me." Terrified. "Fuck me."

Only a beat passes, one single moment where the words hang in the air between them. Then Cameron grabs Ferris by the jaw, pushing their mouths together, proving. The hardness between Ferris' legs presses against his stomach, and suddenly he's looking down at his friend on the flat of his back.

"I've never done this before."

"I don't care. I love you."

Cameron swallows. "Love you, too." He reaches down to place his hand at the waistband of Ferris's pajama pants, and Ferris bucks his hips into the touch. Cameron shudders, his own cock half-hard. It's as if warm water spills over his whole body; blood flowing fast and stomach tightening. He pulls his shirt off over his head, belt buckle clicking as his hands move there next. He pulls the leather strap through its loops and lets it drop to the carpet below, looking down at Ferris watching him. Slowly he unbuttons the top button of his jeans, tugs at his zipper, and it runs through its metal teeth with a faint metallic buzzing. Ferris's eyes flick from his crotch to his face, face to crotch. Cameron eases his jeans from his hips, pushes them down to his kneeling knees. His prick stands out in front of him, reddish and craning. Staring, Ferris sits up. Cameron can feel his breath spread out over the thin skin there, easing closer until Ferris' eyes have gone lidded and his wet mouth has wrapped around the head.

Cameron groans, fingers instinctually wrapping themselves up in Ferris' hair. The other keeps a steady rhythm up and down his shaft, tongue delving deftly over the rivulets of his veins.

"Fuck," he breathes. He lets the other continue for a moment before pulling him back by the hair—he's met by a grin.

"No good?"

"Too good." Cameron bends to kiss deeply the mouth that was just around him, pushing Ferris back onto the mattress and brushing his hand underneath his waistband. Ferris shivers and grasps Cameron's forearm, encouraging him to move with more intent. After a moment he rips the pajama pants from the other, slicking his prick with more spit, and tests it against Ferris's hole. The other pushes back gently, face brave.

"Just go slow at first, okay?"

"Okay."

The desire in him aches, everywhere. He holds himself back and inserts just inch by agonizing inch, intermittently pressing his face into Ferris's neck or his mouth to his mouth. Ferris's brow knits as he concentrates on relaxing, eyes closed, until Cameron slips in at an angle and a moan leaves him, surprises him.

"There?" Cameron asks. Blinded by pleasure, Ferris nods fervently. Cameron bends, collects his arm underneath Ferris's body and angles himself to hit the spot again. Again, Ferris cries out.

"Cam, that feels so good…"

Cameron can feel Ferris tightening around him and he groans with his next stroke. He makes sure the next one is succinct, speeding up his pace. He hits the spot again and again, sweat building on his brow, slicking his chest where it touches Ferris's. Ferris is grasping at his arm, at the sheet, pressing back on to him in a matching rhythm.

"I think—I'm gonna—cum," Ferris moans into his mouth. "I don't—want to—stop…"

Cameron shushes him, making sure he doesn't lose his pace. "Ferris, cum for me, okay? It's okay. Cum for me," he breathes. "You're so fucking beautiful… Let me see you do it…"

Ferris's eyes are open but it is clear they don't see anything, blurred by pleasure. A few tears leak from the corners and Ferris raises his hand to his face and repeats, "Don't leave me—you'll leave—don't leave—"

Cameron takes Ferris's face in his hand and brings their mouths together, all spit and desire. He moves rapidly, makes his strokes shorter and deeper, and Ferris's face cannot separate the sorrow and the pleasure and that's when he climaxes. Cameron holds him tight as he cums, desperately on the edge himself, but not wanting this to end either. Ferris's legs still locked around him he continues to pump with earnest. He feels tears roll down his cheeks and he bends to cry with Ferris, holding on to him as he's held on his whole life, until a shudder goes through him and turns everything rigid in the same breath that it collapses him. When he comes to Ferris is saying, "I loved you first—don't leave me—I loved you first."

He murmurs at the same time as Ferris, insistent. "I love you—I love you."

They cling to one another in Ferris's bed, waiting for the emotion to subside. Cameron takes Ferris's jaw and gently kisses him—kisses him for minutes, whole stretches of time where neither of them want to let up on the other. Something healing happens from this, and when they part Ferris is chuckling, nuzzling his face into Cameron's wide grin.

"Cam, you're like… the sexiest virgin I've ever met."

"Oh?" Cameron laughs. He sighs as Ferris looks up at him with a gaze gone soft.

"I'm really glad that happened. No matter what happens."

Cameron nods, understanding what wasn't said. "Me too, Ferris. Me too."

In the morning, Cameron wakes Ferris after dressing. The other regards him sleepily.

"I'll stay."

Ferris's eyes widen.

"Just the summer. I've got enough for a sublet or something. And I can get a shitty job, somewhere. It'll be just fine."

Cameron takes Ferris's hand in his own when it moves out from beneath the covers. He grasps it warmly, gazing at the other.

"Will this happen again?"

Cameron doesn't speak. Ferris waits and then smiles. He takes his hand back.

"Hey, I hear that the rain is so heavy in Denver, you can't see hills even a half mile off when it starts going."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. And snow, so much snow collects on the mountain peaks in the distance. You'll be able to see all of that stuff, soon."

A few beats pass between them. "You won't marry her, you know."

Ferris laughs. "Who knows. I think I will, though."

Cameron stands from the bedside, fishing into Ferris's nightstand for his roll of cash. He holds it up to Ferris, giving it a small toss and catch before tucking it into his pocket. He can't help but smile back at Ferris's blindly optimistic beaming.

And he just says, "Okay."


End file.
